Token Basics

What is Gnosis?

Gnosis is a decentralized prediction market built on the Ethereum protocol. Gnosis provides an open platform for anyone to predict the outcome of any event and plans to drastically simplify the creation of customized prediction market applications. We view financial and betting applications as ripe for innovation using our open and decentralized model. Our vision is a future in which prediction markets are used to optimize an incredible range of processes and to provide a platform for information sales. Gnosis is a ConsenSys backed project, and was founded by Martin Koeppelmann and Stefan George, who previously founded and built Fairlay.com, a centralized Bitcoin prediction market. Together with ConsenSys we are excellently positioned to execute on our ambitious vision.

What is Ethereum?

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property. This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middle man or counterparty risk [1].

What is a prediction market?

A prediction market allows users to buy and trade binary positions on the outcome of any arbitrary event. "According to most experts ineconomics and finance, speculative markets are exemplary info institutions. That is, active speculative markets do very well at inducing people to acquire info, share it via trades, and collect that info into consensus prices that persuade wider audiences." (Hanson 2013) As such, prediction markets provide an interesting, and potentially more accurate, oracle for the outcome of future events as well as for the reporting of the outcomes of past events.

Why are there two tokens and can you explain the difference between GNO and WIZ?

There are two separate tokens on the Gnosis platform to accomplish two separate functions. Broadly, GNO is used to incentivize long term participation in the platform, while WIZ is used to interact with the platform.

Gnosis Wisdom (WIZ) can be used to pay platform fees on the Services layer, subsidize the fees of other participants, provide initial subsidies for markets, or for market trading. WIZ will be pegged to $1 USD worth of fees. In this way, WIZ acts as a coupon for $1 of use within Gnosis.

Gnosis tokens (GNO) are the generator for Wisdom token (WIZ) creation. WIZ can only be created via activating the utility of the Gnosis (GNO) tokens. This is done via a smart contract system. The smart contract works as follows: GNO token holders agree to “lock” their tokens in a smart contract (30–365 days). A multiplier is added for longer lock durations. The smart contract determines the user selected lock duration and applies that duration to a formula that is designed to regulate the supply of WIZ tokens currently in use. Prior to locking their GNO tokens in the smart contract, users will be able to see exactly how much WIZ they will receive as a result of executing the smart contract. Once users execute the contract, 30% of their WIZ will be distributed for immediate use, and the remaining 70% will be distributed proportionally over the locked duration. Once the lock duration expires, the locked GNO ceases to generate WIZ and the GNO becomes freely transferable by the holder. There is no limit (other than duration) for how many times GNO tokens may be used to create WIZ.

What is the difference between Gnosis and Augur?

The two main differences are:

Gnosis is a platform for prediction market applications. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for 3rd party developer to build prediction market applications which are all based an the same liquidity pool.

There are MANY potential applications and all of them should have very different user interfaces even if they all run ong the same platform. We provide tools and libraries to develop those interfaces. Check out our website for a few example apps.

As a platform Gnosis is oracle agnostic. We support all kind of oracles, centralized, decentralized or combinations. Read chapter 9.3 of our white paper for more details on oracles.

Will all markets be priced in Gnosis tokens?

No - a market creator can choose any token they like - Gnosis is currency/token agnostic. Gnosis tokens are only relevant for the fees that the Gnosis system will charge. All fees can be paid with the token the market is traded in or alternatively with WIZ. It will always be possible for an end user to use a Gnosis application without caring about Gnosis tokens.

Will Gnosis be available on other Blockchains other than Ethereum?

The Gnosis team is deeply involved in the Ethereum community. Nonetheless is our main goal to build a successful prediction market platform. Currently, Ethereum is to us very clearly the best choice to reach this goal. But we can imagine a future in 3-5 years in which a platform like Gnosis can become blockchain agnostic and operate across multiple underlying blockchains. It is also possible that this will be realised purely within Ethereum whereby different shards would be equivalent to different blockchains with different trade-offs for different parameters.

Where can we meet the team?

How will trading on Gnosis work?

At its core a prediction market does two things - it allows to create predictive assets (tokens that represent a specific real world even and which will have a guaranteed value of 1 unit if this outcome happens - 0 otherwise) and second the trading of those assets. Since Gnosis is an open platform those assets can be traded on any exchange (decentralized exchanges, centralised exchanges or even services like “Shapeshift”). However - predictive assets have some properties which make some market mechanisms more effective - like the use of automated market makers that guarantee to provide liquidity. Those mechanism will be the focus of the Gnosis team but will actively contribute to make predictive assets tradable on many places. You can find a bunch of fairly technical discussion around this topic here (https://forum.gnosis.pm/c/technical).

What is the GNO token for?

The core value of GNO tokens is that they will create fee credits which can be used to pay fees on Gnosis or alternatively can be used for trading in specific market. Those credits are called WIZ. You can find a detail blog post about or tokens here.

What is the relationship between Gnosis and ConsenSys?

Gnosis is its own independent company but we have a strong relationship with ConsenSys. This includes ConsenSys holding equity in the Gnosis entity and vice versa, Gnosis founders and early employees will hold equity in ConsenSys. Most importantly, Gnosis will utilize many ConsenSys services, projects, connections, and other benefits.

A few examples of this are the wallet and identity solution uPort, the accounting solution Balanc3 to transparently keep track of the funds, and the back-end infrastructure component Infura. Additionally, ConsenSys projects such as http://boardroom.to/ are looking into using Gnosis's Futarchy solutions.

What will you do with the Ether collected in the token launch?

We are striving to fulfil our mission to source the world’s wisdom. More concretely that means that we will expand the Gnosis platform according to our roadmap. As a practical decision, we intend to hold most funds in Ether. We believe that the success of Gnosis at least in the next few years depends on the success of the Ethereum platform. In that sense, Gnosis is a bet on Ethereum. If we are taking this bet anyway it makes sense to hold Ether.

What will happen with the GNO tokens that have not been sold in the auction?

The Gnosis company will retain tokens not sold in the token launch. These tokens will serve three main purposes including supporting and subsidizing applications building on top of Gnosis, reserves for potential future token launches, and long term incentivization of Gnosis employees.

How many tokens are there?

The total amount of GNO tokens is fixed to 10 million. The amount of WIZ is flexible and depends on platform usage. The more WIZ is used in the platform to pay the platform fee the more WIZ is generated by GNO tokens. The issuance rate of WIZ per GNO is set algorithmically. The algorithms adjusts the issuance rate to target 20 * the monthly average use of WIZ. If on average 1,000,000 WIZ are used to pay fees each month that would mean a target of 20,000,000 WIZ in total existence.

The coupling of WIZ issuance rate to its actual usage will ensure that WIZ does not inflate and will have a relative stable value. Therefore it will be possible to use WIZ in some markets as a collateral. (in plain english: users can make predictions with WIZ and not just pay the fee with WIZ)

What do I need to do, to get WIZ with GNO?

As soon as the WIZ functionality is added it will be possible to lock GNO tokens for 1-12 month at the current WIZ emission rate. Once the GNO is locked down you will receive 30% of the WIZ directly and 70% continuously over the lock period. The amount of WIZ only depends on the emission rate AT the lock down. It does not matter if it will chance during the lock period.

A easy to use interface will be provided where you just specify the time lock period and get in return how much WIZ tokens you would get.

What is the available supply of GNO tokens?

There are exactly 1,104,590 GNO in circulation which is roughly 11% of the total supply (10M GNO). The remaining tokens are locked for future growth of the platform by Gnosis Inc. and in a small part by ConsenSys. The true circulating supply is even lower because tokens that are given to founders and employees are locked in contracts that will disburse them only over a period of four years.

What are the next steps on the Gnosis roadmap?

The next significant steps on the roadmap include an overhaul of the Gnosis management interface, Cryptoeconomics experiments, and the release of our Gnosis Twitter AMA app. The management interface allows users to create and resolve markets. The Cryptoeconomics experiments test Cryptoeconomic assumptions toward Futarchy. The Twitter AMA app allows anyone to easily interface with Gnosis prediction markets using tweets and mobile.